click for larger image

Sample sheet music

Title	In Flanders Fields
Article no.	4073105
Category	Concert/wind/brass band
Subcategory	Contemporary Wind Music (1945-present)
Instrumentation	Fa (fanfare band)
Format	PrtStm (full score and parts)
Country of publication	Belgium (be)
Publisher *	click here
Year of publication	2010
Price	click here
Composer	Derongé, Roger
Difficulty level	4
Additional info/contents	In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row Which mark our place; and in the sky The larks keep flying and bravely singing Among the artillery below barely audible No poem from the First World War is as well known as In Flanders fields. Scarred by the horror of war, Canadian army doctor, John McCrae, wrote this poem in 1915 at his nursing post near Ypres. McCrae died in the field hospital in 1918. The poppie, the poppy has become the symbol of war because this frail flower can survive in places where the earth has been churned up by fighting and bombing, in places where everything else is dead. Roger Derongé's composition In Flanders fields begins peacefully, in the spring of 1914 in the Belgian Westhoek, at a time when everything is still seemingly calm. That calm is only an illusion because after the assassination of Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, tension is felt throughout Europe. The music soon takes on menacing overtones. Horror erupted when German troops invaded Belgium on 4 August 1914, clearly audible in the composition, which also burst open at that moment. The soldiers communicated with each other via morse signals, among others, which are interpreted in the work by the euphonium, tenor sax, clarinet and oboe. The tone in the composition becomes dejected as there are soon countless casualties. The fugue that follows recounts the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, a hell of mud and fire, one of the bloodiest battles of all time, huge human losses on both sides of the lines, and this for barely 8 kilometres of ground gain. The powerful percussion paints a picture of the terrible bombardments. Incessant rains turned the battlefield into a swamp. Surviving soldiers later recounted how they used their comrades-in-arms and horses swallowed by the mud as stepping stones to move forward. Slowly, the region comes into Allied hands. Belgian troops were joined by British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand troops, among others. A step march refers to this. On 28 September 1918, the village of Passchendaele was finally retaken from the Germans. Further into his poem, John Mc Crae writes: ... If Ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields. If you, survivors, break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies bloom In Flanders fields. By this, Mc Crae meant that one must never, ever forget the war with its many victims. And they never do, because since 1928, uninterrupted, except for the period '40-'45, every evening at eight o'clock sharp, around the impressive Menin Gate in Ypres, life falls silent for a moment. The clarion players of the Volunteer Fire Brigade then play The Last Post, every day, winter and summer, sometimes in front of hundreds of people present but just as well when nobody attends this short, haunting ceremony; a never-ending tribute to all victims of "Den Grooten Oorlog" (The Great War). Roger Derongé ends his composition with this moving Last Post. Because war has no winners but only losers... In Flanders fields.
Sample sheet music	click here
Sample score *	click here
Sound sample *	click here
Video sample *	click here
Listen to this in the Musicainfo Radio *	click here
Available	yes
ergänzender Text *	click here

add to shopping basket

* Fields with a star are only visible for club members after registration.

In order to see the demo scores you need Adobe Reader, which you can download free. Just click on the following link.

In order to listen to the sound samples you need an MP3 player, which you can download free, for example: